Kathryn Steakley » Planetary Group

KathrynSteakley

Education

BS: University of Washington, 2012

Biographical Info

Research

My research focuses on Martian climate and surface-atmosphere interactions on Mars. I work with Dr. Jim Murphy in the planetary group as well as NASA scientists Dr. Melinda Kahre and Dr. Bob Haberle from the NASA Ames Mars Climate Modeling Group. We are investigating the type of climate that could have supported liquid water on Mars roughly 3.5-3.8 billion years ago. Geologic evidence suggests that liquid water eroded river valley networks, but the climate modeling community still does not know how Mars could have supported a warmer, wetter environment in the past. Specifically, we are testing whether comet and asteroid impacts could have jump-started a water cloud greenhouse for early Mars. I use the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) Mars Global Climate Model (MGCM) to simulate post-impact climate scenarios and test this impact heating hypothesis. I have worked with the NASA Ames team to develop an early Mars version of the Ames Global Climate Model (GCM) in order to conduct these modeling tests. In 2015, I was awarded a NASA Advanced STEM Research Training and Research (ASTAR) fellowship, which supports this research.

I also study dust devils on Mars and their potential connection to the background dust opacity. On Mars, dust devils can become incredibly large, growing to be wider than a football field and over a mile high. We want to understand how often dust devils occur, how much dust they lift (if any), and what factors contribute to or inhibit dust lifting. I worked with Dr. Jim Murphy to detect and characterize dust devils on Mars using meteorological data collected by the Curiosity rover.

I completed a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy in the fall of 2012 at the University of Washington. As an REU student intern at the SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), I worked with Dr. Peter Jenniskens on the Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project. This project involved determining light curves, altitudes, and latitudes and longitudes of large numbers of meteors caught by the network of video cameras. I identified a previously undocumented meteor stream, now added to the IAU Working List of Meteor Showers.